Tag

virtualreality

Hardly a day has gone by this month without the announcement of a new virtual reality (VR) camera system. Facebook, Google and GoPro all aim to make VR more immersive with new cameras, some of which won’t be commercially released for the foreseeable future. However, researchers at Adobe believe that you may not need new camera hardware at all for a big leap in immersion.

Adobe’s head of research Gavin Miller is going to present new cutting-edge technology at NAB in Las Vegas this Tuesday that could one day be used to turn flat, monoscopic 360-degree videos shot with consumer-grade spherical cameras into fully immersive VR video, complete with the ability to lean into the video — something that’s being called six degrees of freedom (6DoF) among industry insiders…

As we enter Year 2 of the emergence of Virtual Reality as a consumer platform, we will see many analysts, articles and pundits weigh in on the state of the nascent industry. They will ask things like: Who are the early winners and losers? Is VR already whiffing on the huge expectations set in early 2016? Are we about to enter the trough of disillusionment and can the industry recover from this setback?

I believe that these questions, while fun to ask, read about and debate on Twitter, fundamentally miss the point…

I would like to share some of my thoughts on key developments that I believe will determine our lives in the upcoming two decades. Almost all of this is fueled by ever more accelerating technological progress and there are a lot of opportunities in it. As well as significant challenges.

“If the transcension hypothesis is correct, inner space, not outer space, is the final frontier for universal intelligence. Our destiny is density.” – John Smart

Only decades into our “age of cosmology” — the moment when we earned the technological rights to peer deep into our cosmic home — we’ve learned that we live in a mega-palace of a universe. And we’ve also found something odd. We seem to be the only ones home! Where are the aliens? Was it something we said?

Within just a single generation, powerful telescopes, satellites, and space probes have given us tools to explore the structure of our universe. And the more we find; the more we discover how fine-tuned it could be for life…

Like every child growing up in the Nineties, I spent a good chunk of my time watching the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. But in laying the foundation for being an adult geek, there was another show I liked much better.

VR Troopers was produced by Saban Entertainment, the same company behind the Power Rangers, and was made to copy a lot of the elements that made the other series a huge hit. It also featured a team of young adults trying to defeat an evil overlord by transforming into super-powered versions of themselves, but there was a big difference — they had to use virtual reality to do it…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on stage wearing a virtual reality headset, feigning surprise at an expressive cartoon simulacrum that seemed to perfectly follow his every gesture.

The audience laughed. Zuckerberg was in the middle of what he described as the first live demo inside VR, manipulating his digital avatar to show off the new social features of the Rift headset from Facebook subsidiary Oculus. The venue was an Oculus developer conference convened earlier this fall in San Jose. Moments later, Zuckerberg and two Oculus employees were transported to his glass-enclosed office at Facebook, and then to his infamously sequestered home in Palo Alto…”

Let a thousand virtual worlds rain down from the clouds. Or rather, the cloud. That’s the call from Google as it gets behind a tiny British startup called Improbable. Founded by two Cambridge graduates and backed by $20 million in funding from the venture capitalists at Andreessen Horowitz, Improbable offers a new way of building virtual worlds, including not just immersive games à la Second Life or World of Warcraft, but also vast digital simulations of real cities, economies, and biological systems. The idea is that these virtual worlds can run in a holistic way across a practically infinite network of computers, so that they can expand to unprecedented sizes and reach new levels of complexity…

After a couple years of being driven primarily by the startups, the virtual reality industry is growing to be one increasingly dominated by the big dogs.There’s still a sizable amount of fragmentation in the industry as well a high chance of failure for many of the efforts currently being undertaken. For these reasons some of the biggest names in the industry, Google, HTC, Oculus, Samsung, Sony and Acer have joined forces to create the Global Virtual Reality Association (GVRA) which aims to “unlock and maximize VR’s potential,” but its really not clear what this all means for consumers…

At GTC Europe in Amsterdam last month, NVIDIA’s ‘VR Village’ was host to a number of cutting-edge virtual reality demos, many of which we’ve had our hands on before. But there was something new being shown behind closed doors.No cameras were permitted inside the booth, nor am I at liberty to say which brand was involved. Having no idea what to expect, I donned a Vive headset, and found myself in a typical 3D modelling environment (a grey void), standing next to a model of a popular four-door family sedan…